Mustang 5.0L Takes on the Competition

Ł13.95

Real performance and big-block motors had been off the agenda for so long after the fuel crises of the 1970s that the return of Ford’s 302 cubic inch V8 for the 1982-season Mustangs was greeted with a sign of relief by US motoring enthusiasts. These were the 1980s, though, and the European and Japanese influences of the last two decades had made themselves felt. So the 302 was no longer a 302, but rather a fashionable 5.0-litre. One way or another, the newly muscular Mustang excited a great deal of interest. Was it faster than other performance pretenders of the time, such as the restyled Camaros and Firebirds which came from GM in the same year? Was it a performance car in the same league as the Muscle Cars of old? After all, 157bhp didn’t sound very much when stacked up against twice as many (advertised) horsepower in the performance machinery of the 1960s. So the magazines of the day set about discovering just how good this new Mustang really was. They compared it with Camaros, Firebirds, Porsche 928s, and even some of the classic Muscle Cars of the 1960s. Meanwhile, the performance shops got to work on the car to see how much more they could squeeze from Ford's engineering - and so the magazines compared one version with another to find the ultimate Mustang. It was all about performance, and the Mustang GT of the 1980s and early 1990s still stands up as a fine example of a modern American performance machine today. The road tests and comparisons reproduced in this book show just how well it fared against both the stopwatch and some pretty stiff competition. 140 pages, approx. 250 illus. SB. SKU: MU5PY ISBN: 9781855205260